Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Gun-Ho City!]

It's a good start – and please continue working on it – but I have several issues with the game as it works right now. The major ones:

– The perspective is weird. It's top-down, but your collision box is flat, not just at your feet. Therefore you keep getting hit by missiles which should logically go around you, you bump your head into traffic cones if you walk too close.
– The worst offender of the above is the hospital: bumping your head into its *wall* immediately makes you enter and deducts $20. There's no confirmation screen, the interior is simply a transparent void, and you can still lose money even at full health.
– Leaving a building puts you in the middle of the road, instead of in front of the building.
– At first, I didn't understand the screen loops, and because you're standing on a road, I thought I'm supposed to explore the surroundings. That's not the case.
– The shops are the first things you see, before you even know what you're dealing with, before you even know what you're supposed to be doing. You should make it so the player at least encounters an enemy before they can reach the shop for the first time.
– It really does lag, especially when you walk onto a different terrain for the first time. What happens there? Perhaps there's some loading which can be optimised by loading gradually or in the background, instead of all at once.
– Enemies are somewhat optional. You encounter them at two exact locations, and they don't spawn unless you're nearby. They immediately walk away (which is great because you can't just stand and keep shooting them) and continue to chase after you, but you can just walk into the shop if you get in trouble and leave.
– Shooting enemies is a hassle. They shoot your oversized hitbox with perfect precision, but you have to position yourself perfectly to shoot them. If they miss, they just walk into you, and they can also come in groups and shoot barrages of bullets at once. It becomes very chaotic very quickly and you can't reasonably defend yourself.
– What's the goal? What do you achieve? Is there a victory condition, a sense of progression?

There are some minor issues to talk about, too (e.g. the position of your feet shouldn't change when you simply change the direction), but focusing on fine-tuning the details is unimportant when there are more glaring issues.

All in all, the main problem is that the game – the core gameplay – isn't all that enjoyable; at least for me.
Take a step back (put aside cash, ammo, upgradeable equipment) and consider what should be the one gameplay element to stay if you had to remove everything else. Or describe the game in one sentence ("It's a game about (…).").
"Shooting enemies, dodging bullets" might be an answer; in such case make sure shooting enemies is enjoyable, not frustrating (e.g. shoot with the mouse, make bullets larger, slow down enemies etc.) and you can actually dodge incoming bullets (limit the number of enemies, make the bullets slower). You could also spawn enemies from all sides of the map, not just from two spawn points, to make it less predictable.
But it's up to you – I'm just listing what might be viable options, but you might find out something works much better.

I hope that helped. It's a very good start, but the core design needs some tweaking.

jackwhite083 responds:

I cannot thank you enough for making this lengthy review! I am still new to the game engine i am using and i'm still figuring out what i need in my game and how to implement it.

-I am still learning about hitboxes and collision and i was not aware about the perspective issue so thank you for noticing it!
-I do not own a mouse so i never thought about using it for my games but i think now i should implement it in my games, maybe it could be optional to help me with play testing.
-One thing i am now learning about is how open world games load they're games procedually so i will learn how to do that when I am making my next large game!
-This game was mainly made for me to learn about how to create open world games so i only really uploaded this for the advice like this so i didn't add things like a story or a main goal as I wanted to move on to my next project so i can learn more.

Thank you again, it is people like you that make me want to make games :)

[Fast Math 2]

I wondered what kind of math question you'd show and how exactly the difficulty would increase. Unfortunately, it's all just additions and subtractions with a slightly larger numerical range over time, which isn't really that impressive.
I'd introduce new operations – let's say, every fifteen questions: multiplication, division, fractions, or go all out at later stages with stuff like "sin 90° = 1", "log2 (8) = 3", "derivative 2x = 2" etc. It would make the game more interesting because of the bigger variety and by making people wonder what comes next, thus keeping them engaged for longer.

It also needs some balancing. I got to question #25 until I got bored and started clicking randomly without even looking at the question, which got me safely to question #63 when I ran out of time (and could probably go further if I clicked faster).
Consider these options:
1) Increase time deducted for a wrong guess. While it's very good that you don't lose after the first wrong guess, it shouldn't be possible to try all four options before your time limit runs out.
2) Use a "total time" bar shared by all questions. A successfully answered question on the first try increases the timer, a wrong answer does nothing – thus if you make a mistake, you have to make up for it with a chain of correct answers.

But mainly, endless games need to introduce new elements to still simulate the sense of "progress". This doesn't have it (yet).

[Golem Platformer]

Okay… is it just a single level?
It's a fine prototype for a game, but it just doesn't have enough content. You're done within a minute.

Also, I have a few tips for improvements if you plan to work on this further.
– There are no sounds. Games with sounds (and possibly music) are instantly more enjoyable.
– The dystopian background is quite cluttered and the foreground with the player doesn't stand out as much.
– For some reason, jumping on the platform at the beginning of the level restarts the game even though it looks exactly the same as the ground. The actual ground hovers a bit above the bottom end of the screen (there's a small gap).
– The cave exit has thin white artifacts around it, and it looks like you saved it as *.jpg, and then attempted to fill it with a paint bucket, which resulted in the uneven fill.
– There's an invisible barrier at the top of the screen, which makes it harder to collect the topmost coins (you have to jump precisely underneath it)

All in all, it's a good start, and I hope you'll continue to work on this, but I don't really think it's a fun game to play at this stage yet.

BanaCompany responds:

thanks for the advice

[I keep Forgetting]

Pretty good idea, and with an inspirational message.
Simply executed – which is good. I feel that the more flawed and simple the game is, the more it fits with the core idea.

[2 ball pong]

Congratulations on your first game here!
It's a classic game of Pong, made slightly unusual by the two balls and a single-player mode without an opponent. The balls also change direction mid-air without hitting anything – I don't know if it's intended.
I also don't think I'd ever play the two-player version because the game ends after scoring the first goal and you usually don't invite people for 'a two-second game'. I'd make the two-player game end after 10 goals or something. I know you can restart it right away and count your score manually, but that's not the same.

Two main flaws:
– Please don't ever use alerts or prompts in games. They block the whole page until you confirm the window, are annoying and after a couple of them, the browser starts to block them automatically, so you'd have no idea what your score was.
Show the score in the game canvas (constantly updated, or just the final one).
– Arrow keys move the entire page. This is a common bug in HTML5 games, you need to block the relevant keycodes from being picked up by the browser:
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/developer-resources/unity3d-webgl-support#wiki_toc_6
Without that, the game is virtually unplayable.

Additionally, I don't quite understand what the score actually is. If it's time, then I have no idea what unit it's in, and besides, losing as soon as possible seems to always result in score 97 which is an odd choice to mean anything specific.
Oh, and once one of the balls got stuck inside the paddle and just wiggled back and front.
And why is 'soehn' being outputted to the browser console every time you start the game?

Larbagar responds:

Dear Rallyx
Thank you so much for your feedback, the reason that the balls change mid air is because without that you would not be ready to start playing. I will later fix this with a countdown.
As for the 2 player problem, thank you for that comment as I would never had caught that, I will get to work on that.
For the score issues, the score is counted in frames (so slower computers will have slower point gains which is another bug) but later I plan to have the score somewhere in the center of the screen with a color lighter than the background.
I noticed the scrolling issue immediately and have been looking for a fix (I had been using a blank page so there was nothing to scroll down from), but I have found nothing. Thank you SO much for that link.
As for the balls bouncing inside the paddle, I was just being lazy and made the paddle a ray instead of a segment so I will fix that.
Once again, thank you for the feedback.
Larbagar

[Dumbocalypse]

Never mind the game; the news articles are pure gold!

monish97 responds:

News gets much more exciting with coffee (wink) (wink)

[Blue Sky Demo]

In general, it's a fine game with good ideas and nice graphics, but too unforgiving. You make one mistake and despite having three hearts left, you go back to start.
I don't need more levels, because I can barely make it past the first red plane. And when I die, replaying it all over again for a little mistake is annoying and eventually, I stop being interested in playing.

There's no temporary invincibility, so crashing into a building, the top or bottom of the screen is an instant game over. You lose a heart if you crash into an enemy because they are destroyed, but the enemy immediately after them causes you to lose another. The green planes take too many shots to kill and because you only shoot in front of you, unless you destroy them immediately after they appear, they'll crash into you from below or above. You can't move left or right to allow you to circle around them, so once they get close to you, you're essentially screwed.

You could make all this a bit easier by making your weapons more powerful, or extending the time intervals between enemy encounters, *fixing* the temporary invincibility, decreasing the speed, or the health of the enemies… pick anything.
I wouldn't mind losing the auto-shoot feature in exchange for more powerful bullets, even with larger intervals in between.

The red plane moving with you is a nice idea, but unless you make sure to kill it as soon as possible, it's going to kill you when the buildings appear again, together with regular enemies. I'd loop that section of the level (even with buildings) and spawn regular enemies only after you defeat the plane, otherwise, it can be almost impossible to win afterwards.

That's it.
I originally didn't want to write anything, since I couldn't see very much of the game and really didn't want to replay the initial sequence for 150th time, but on the other hand, the game isn't bad or anything, just annoyingly difficult.
Seeing you don't have any comments from other people, perhaps some of them shared my sentiment.

vainius123 responds:

I have a ridiculous passion for insane difficulty i have defeated most of the hardest games in the world(BattleToads, BattleToads n Double Dragon, IWBTG, all Contra series and so on ) so this game is very easy for me i win 80% of the time from the first try but i released another game before and not a single person was able to go through the first level so for now on i will make the game easy for me so that it is possible for others to play. Thank you very much for the feedback the feedbacks keeps me motivated creating more and better games and you mentioned all the things that I didnt notice so Thank You very much!!!

[clockwise]

I think it's a very interesting concept; brilliant. Whenever it started to feel repetitive, a new mechanic was introduced to mix things up a little. Really nice puzzle game.
Although, I'd appreciate if you saw the total number of levels beforehand in the level select screen, not after you unlock them all.

josehzz358 responds:

Thanks for playing, in a future update I'll add that to the level select screen :)